Conventionally, an imaging apparatus that captures a subject image and stores the subject image on a storage medium has been put to practical use. However, as the capacity of the storage medium increases, it has been demanded that the stored image can be retrieved easily.
In response to this demand, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-76302 proposes an imaging apparatus that extracts a characteristic amount of image data stored on a storage medium and a characteristic amount of key image data and compares both the characteristic amounts to retrieve desired image data.
There has also been proposed a method of making it easy to visually understand the similarity of images (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-311246). In the invention described in the reference, in displaying similar images, a characteristic amount is extracted from image data of respective images, a characteristic amount space is divided hierarchically on the basis of the extracted characteristic amount, a tree structure is formed, and a display space is formed on the basis of the tree structure.